This Week in History 7/2/04 July 4, 2001: Britain's former ambassador to Keith Morris, comes out for legalization in The Guardian. Morris writes: It must be time to start discussing how drugs could be controlled more effectively within a legal framework. Decriminalization, which is often mentioned, would be an unsatisfactory halfway house, because it would leave the trade in criminal hands, giving no help at all to the producer countries, and would not guarantee consumers a safe product or free them from the pressure of pushers. It has been difficult for me to advocate legalization because it means saying to those with whom I worked, and to the relatives of those who died, that this was an unnecessary war. But the imperative must be to try to stop the damage. Drug prohibition does not work. July 1996: National Review publishes a selection from the 400 letters to the editor they received following their February 1996 cover and set of essays calling for drug legalization: http://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/nr0796.htm http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/344/history.shtml